European Grid of Solar Observation

Solar Feature Catalogues

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EGSO News

May 2005 New MSc degree in Intelligent Data Mining at Cybernetics
department, Bradford University starts from September 2005. For the
inquiries please contact Recruitment Office in Horton A1.09.

May 2005Present 1 oral talk on the solar activity in the cycle 23 at
the Assembly of the American Geophysical Union - Solar Division Meeting, 26
May 2005, New Orleans, US.

April 2005 The EGSO Solar Feature Catalogue (SFC) is now available for experimentation
here.

March 2005Presented 1 oral talk on sunspot statistics, two posters on
active region statistics and general EGSO project at European Geophysical
Union Assembly, Vienna, Austria

February 20054 Papers based on results obtained from EGSO SFC are
accepted for publication in Solar Physics Frontiers in Image Processing Special Issues

January 2005Started work on generating Active Region/Plage data from Meudon Halpha
observations. Data will be available by June 2005.

Introduction

EGSO, the "European Grid of Solar
Observations", is a Grid test-bed that will lay the
foundations of a "Virtual Solar Observatory".

With a substantial increase in size of solar image data sets, the automated detection and verification of
various features of interest is becoming increasingly important for, among other applications, the reliable
forecast of the solar activity and space weather and data mining. However, this raises the accuracy and
reliability requirements to the detection techniques applied for an automated recognition that have to be
significantly improved in comparison with the existing manual ones.
One of the chief objectives for European
Grid of Solar Observations (EGSO) Project Work Package 5 was a production of Solar Feature Catalogues by means
of the automated feature recognition methods.

There is a growing number of archives of digitized images of the Sun, taken from ground-based and space
in-struments in various wavelengths. These archives are available from different locations and are to be
included into a unified catalogue by the European Grid for Solar Observations (EGSO) project (Bentley, 2002) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002ESASP.506..923B

Digitized solar images from different sources have a variety of sizes, resolutions, dynamic ranges and
instrumental and weather associated distortions. All are to be subjected to automated recognition processes
in order to provide reliable data on the locations of features and their evolution at different times relative
to solar rotation. This is aimed partly at the growing demand for solar activity forecasts by the space weather
project and by many industrial organizations, which have a great need for the development of reliable and fast
techniques for feature recognition on solar disks and their presentation in Solar Feature Catalogues.

These
catalogues are intended to contain comprehensive statistics of active events (sunspots, active regions, filaments,
flares, etc.), overlapping in a given period of time and to allow the extraction of physical characteristics,
which are essential for the solar activity forecast.
This requires designing advanced image recognition techniques in order to identify individual features
(sunspots, active regions, filaments, magnetic neutral lines, etc.) on the images with strongly varying
background caused by different terrestrial atmosphere observing conditions of solar atmosphere activity
period, irregularities in shape caused by instrumental errors or any other noise in images like strips
or signatures etc. For added reliability, these algorithms have to use cross-referenced criteria at
multiple wavelengths in order to correctly identify the features of interest while fully utilizing all
the datasets linked into the Grid.

EGSO is funded under the Information
Society Technologies (IST) thematic programme of the
European Commission's Fifth Framework Programme. The
project is one of many partners from across Europe that
co-operate through the EU GRIDSTART initiative. EGSO is
also working closely with the US VSO project, funded by
NASA.